brings h
'UOOS
nee sfyl.'!
By LUCY HOOD
is posv-modern.
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1
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do
o Chapel
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HE dance portion of the Fine
Arts Festival will open Tuesday,
March 31 with William Punas'
presentation of Feathers.
William Dunas is a choreographer
and performer fpr his four-man,
modern dance company. Feathers is a
60 minute documentary on seven
dances choreographed' by Dunas In
addition, his company, the Trust, will
perform on Thursday April and on
Saturday April 4.
ne sdia mat coin numoers would
follow a form known as dance text. In
describing Dance text Dunas said,
"Wp Hrm'fr lico f rarliirnal miicir- aia'
use words."
Dunas describes his work as post
modern meaning it is adapted from
the style of Merce Cunningham, a
leading figure in the evolution of
modern dance.
"Many people were influenced by
his (Cunningham's) work in many
ways," he said. "Mine is different in
that I'm using ballet vocabulary;
others are using modern vocabulary."
Through his works, Dunas creates
the image of a man struggling against
insurmountable internal conflicts
that tend to be more painful than
pleasant to watch.
Deborah Jowitt, Dance critic for
the Village Voice, reported that in an
interview Dunas said, "he didn't
deliberately set about to cause pain
or discomfort to members of the
audience, but that perhaps that was a
side effect of trying to create images
that would be powerful enough to
stick with them." M
T
tor P
Tho Trust
Three members from the Trust perform the choreography of William
Dunas who directs the company. Staged from left to right are Susanna
Weiss,,Pat Graf and Janna Jensen.
eter Arnott, rnarionottos ore not just puppets
D
By CLIFTON METCALF
ON'T Jook for any of Peter Arnott's puppets to guest
star on "The Muppet Show" anytime soon; you
probably won't find them.
The puppets, or to be more precise, marionettes, are not
designed for humor. Their purpose is the production of
classical drama.
Arnott, rhymes with marionette, will be in Chapel Hill
March 31 and April 1 to perform during-the Fine Arts
Festival.- He will perform the Creek play "Antigone," by
Sophocles, and as always, he will perform it singlehandedly.
He is the translator, director, production technician, and
voice of each character in the play. Currently with seven
scripts committed to memory, Arnott knows well over 50
separate parts, mis repertoire contains plays by Aeschylus,
Furipides, and Sophocles. ,
Born in England in 1931, Arnott began working with
marionettes when he was in high school and has been
performing publicly for 33 years. Since coming to the United
States in 1958, he has performed throughout North America
at Shakespeare festivals, high schools, and universities
including Yale, Harvard, and Princeton.
"I got into this thing because I wanted people to see plays
that they have read come alive. I feel that if they can see it,
they will appreciate it more, and hopefully, understand it
better," Arnott said.
Arnott said the most important aspect of what he does is
the play itself, not the fact he uses marionettes. "I try to
reconstruct the relationship between the audience and the
performance. Since you can't play them in a full-size Creek
theater, which was enormous, the only, solution is to shrink
the performance.'
In making his translations, Arnott is concerned with th
language. Since the audience can't see the actors clearly, the
scale requires him-to deal with the kind of theater which has
to work almost entirely with words.
Arnott is possibly the only person in the English-speaking
theater using marionettes. There are marionette theaters in,
Czechoslovakia and Austria, but they perform opera, he"
said. He is the only person he knows of using marionettes in
classical drama and . "certainly the only one doing it
singlehandedly." - 0
tyron to return
to Southern roots
By TIM PRESTON
J i a . i -.
h consiuer myseii an American - wmer, witn -
distinctly Southern roots," William Styron said.
The 56-year-old novelist, whose most recent
novel, Sophie's Choice, was on the bestseller list for 47
weeks, will be in Chapel Hill in conjunction with the Fine
Arts Festival. Styron will address creative writing classes at
2 p.m. Thursday, April 2 in Creenlaw and will read from his
work at 8 p.m. Friday April 3 in Creenlaw 101.
Styron received his college education in North Carolina
first at Davidson College, then at Duke University.
"At Duke University, he was one of a group of students
that turned out to be writers after William Blackburn's
creative writing, -classes," said "Louis Rubin, professor of
English at UNC.
After graduating from Duke, Styron "like so many, wanted
to go to an exciting place like New York." He has lived near
New York City since the early 1950s.
"It didn't represent any repudiation of the South," Styron
explained. Marriage and "no ties to the South" reinforced his
decision to live in Connecticut.
In 1951, the 26-year-old Styron was awarded the Prix de
Rome from theAcademy of Arts and Letters for his first
novel. Lie Down in Darkness. Other awards have followed; a
Pulitzer Prize for The Confessions of Nat Turner in-1968 and
the American Book Award for Fiction in May 1980 for
Sophie's Choice.
."Awards don't mean much to me," Styron admitted. "An
award in itself is hardly a reasonable index for achievement.
Personal satisfaction is more important."
His work has also attracted harsh criticism. Some Leftist
and black writers considered The Confessions of Nat Turner a
racist work. Three other books written about the Nat Turner
rebellion were published in 1968.
"It came out just at the right time for a book about Nat
Turner to come out," Rubin said. "There was some criticism
brought against him very unfairly. It was a very interesting
literary-sociological phenomenon."
In Sophie's Choice, a young Southerner narrates a Polish
Catholic's account of her experiences in the Holocaust.
Sophie's plight is analogous to similar situations in each of
Styron's four novels and one novella. In an interview with
Saturday Review, Styron explained.
"I suppose the pathos of the victim has always been a
central consideration in what I've written the victimization
of people by life or by other human beings,"
His wife, Eva, said that although there might seem to be a
problem with one person being able to handle the puppets,
there really isn't. "The Greeks never had more than three
characters on stage at one time," she said. "So all he does is
use one puppet in each hand and suspend the third from a
kind of gallows he has fixed up."
Peter-Aicher, a graduate student in the UNC Classics
Department, saw Arnott perform three years ago and invited
him to come to the Fine Arts Festival..
Arnott estimates he has about 50 puppets he uses in tho
productions. He makes the heads for them and his wife
makes the bodies. . Arnott packs the aluminum traveling
stage into a large suitcase, puts the puppets in another
suitcase, and is ready to go.
"The only real problem I've had with this medium had
nothing to do with the concept of the performance." Arnott
said. The problem has been persuading audiences that his
puppets are not just children's entertainment, he said.
"In; the first years, people would see a marionette
performance advertised, and they wouldn't bother to look at
what it was. So thev would briny in their three-vear-nlds tn
see 'Oedipus Rex',"
.' Arnott admits that his productions tend to appeal to those
"who have a bit of knowledge about Creek drama." But he
insists that his audiences are not limited to "classical drama
specialists."
"In fact," he said, "I can't remember many audiences who
have gone away unhappy with what they saw." vj
Jean-Paul Simon
French, video critic
By LESLIE MEEDS
nIGHT, color and sound intermingle to form
? electronical images on the videotape, "Video
about Video, Four French Artists." .
This French Video Exhibit, organized by 33-year-old
Jean-Paul Simon, is a creative combination of
videotapes and stills composed by four Frenchmen;
Paul Armand Gette, Philippe Guerrier, Thierry Kuntzel
and Philippe Oudard.
For Simon, the repetitive nature of the title, "Video
about Video, Four French Artists," reinforces the
concept that the artists create a structure that refers
back to different moments within the same general
procedure.
.Helping arrange Simon's visit to the United States is
Sima Codfrey, assistant professor in the romance
language department at UNC. who describes Simon as
a young, blonde Frenchman who speaks english
flawlessly. "He is never happy doing just one project,"
Godfrey said. "He's actively involved in many cultural
and academic uses of the media both in the United
States and Europe."
Jean-Paul Simon, editor of two French journals, "Le
Filmique" and "Economie et Cinema," and author of
two Books, "Ca Cinema" and "Videoglyphes," is being
sent by the French government to present his 1980
exhibit for the Fine Arts Festival.
Weekender, March 26, 198 J 5
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